YA DIGG? Yahoo Buying Digg, Allegedly

January 26th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

Kevin Burton is repeating the rumor - with more surety this time - that Yahoo will indeed buy Digg next week. The figure of $30 million is being suggested. I’ll keep my opinions to myself until we actually get some confirmation.

More from Thomas Hawk, Search Engine Journal, Conversion Rater, Guardian Unlimited and others.

FireAnt - Best Vlog Directory Yet

January 25th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

FireAnt used to be an excellent desktop vlog reader - now there’s a web directory, too! Starting today, FireAnt.tv is the home of the killerest video blog directory around. In the past, finding vlogs was hard work - now FireAnt has done for video blogging what Odeo, PodcastAlley and Podshow did for podcasting. (MeFeedia is doing good things too, but FireAnt has really nailed the interface.) Mike at TechCrunch writes:

The FireAnt site is now a full videoblogging directory that allows users to tag and rate videoblogs, subscribe to feeds and queue them up for watching or downloading. You can also watch any videoblog directly on the website in its original file format (this last point is important)…FireAnt works closely with other videoblogging services like Mefeedia (a directory and aggregator) and Blip.tv (a service which, among other things, provides a great platform for videobloggers to host their content) to ensure that they are all launching compatible platform and application services.

If podcasting is in its infancy, vlogging (or video blogging?) is positively embryonic. We saw ads quietly sneak into RSS feeds and podcasts, and now services like Revver are finding ways to do the same for video. I don’t think it’ll be too long before some vloggers seek to be ad-supported. But as I’ve been saying for a while, what we really need are audio and video versions of Adsense - where’s Google when you need it?

FeedTier - Create RSS Feeds from any Webpage

January 25th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

While cleaning out my email (only 50 unread messages!), I stumbled across a neat service called FeedTier. The site lets you generate an RSS feed from any page - no orange icon required! From the FeedTier site:

FeedTier is a web feeds generator for web pages without an existing syndication format. FeedTier performs content analysis, picks-up the most prominent cluster of hyperlinks and automatically generates RSS web feeds from web pages without existing syndication. FeedTier (beta) is an experimental service and free for personal use.

I like the ability to subscribe to eBay listings and Google Search results - very slick!

Yet More Revenue Sharing: RawSugar’s Rewards Program

January 25th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

Yep, more revenue-sharing, folks. The bookmarking site/directory RawSugar has a Rewards program, although it’s not exactly clear how it works. Based on this blog post, it appears to be a pay-per-pageview model, which isn’t the best of ideas. It also looks like the Rewards program might be a temporary thing, but I’m sure the Rawsugar guys can chime in to explain more. From the RawSugar blog:

The first month of our new Rewards program is over so we had the number crunchers go to work tallying up the numbers. We’re proud to announce the first members to get paid…showing the global reach of RawSugar’s membership, three of these directories are published by people who live outside the United States. Each of the five covers a different information domain too. The new month means the standings are reset to zero. If you aren’t signed up, do head over to the registration form and make your directory eligible for January’s payouts; register once and your directory remains in the program as long as it runs.

It’ll be interesting to see if the ad revenue from social bookmarking sites will ever be more than a token gesture to users. Admittedly, Rawsugar is only paying a bounty to the top users, while Simpy will let everyone profit, but it’s not clear whether the pageviews generated by the average user will ever amount to real cash. Case in point: Epinions.com, which started out paying users a few dollars for every product review they submitted - as the site grew, the payments dropped to less than a cent. Still, it makes me wonder if Yahoo will spot this obvious opportunity to monetize del.icio.us.

More Revenue Sharing: Simpy Pays You To Bookmark

January 25th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

It’s not just Yahoo that wants to share revenue with users: the social bookmarking site Simpy is having a go too. From the Simpy blog earlier this month:

Simpy has support for Google AdSense as a third party. Each Simpy member has his/her main page on Simpy (e.g. http://www.simpy.com/user/otis ). Every Simpy member can now enter his/her Google AdSense Id into Simpy, and his/her page will immediately start showing ads with his/her Id. All earnings from such ads go to members, as their Ids are used to display ads. The same may soon start happening on the search results page, and on the user profile page, once that is ready. Your page, your data, your ads, your money.

Otis Gospodnetić (Simpy’s founder) posted an update yesterday on how the scheme is doing. It’s definitely a sign of goodwill towards users, but I’m not sure that paying 100% profit to the user makes absolute business sense (in Yahoo’s case it made sense because they owned the ad network itself). Nonetheless, I’m always happy to see more revenue-sharing in the realm of user-generated content. If you see any more examples, let me know.

Printing Virtual-World Objects on Your Desktop

January 25th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

Back in May 2005 csven kicked off an interesting conversation about how you could grab 3D data from virtual worlds and send it off to a 3D printer for fabrication. Now Boing Boing has reported some more coolness - Michael Frumin from Eyebeam’s OpenLab has printed a World of Warcraft character in 3D:

His latest project is the OpenGLExtractor (OGLE), essentially a “screen grab” application for 3D data. For example, Frumin used his software to capture a World of Warcraft character from within the game and physically rendered it using a 3D printer. He also mashed up characters from SecondLife and Google Earth, and imported chunks of Google Earth data into Maya. OGLE seems to be a pretty amazing tool for blurring the virtual and real.

User-generated objects. Awesome.

Yahoo Answers To Pay Users!

January 24th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

Interesting news from Jensense - Yahoo is trying out yet more revenue sharing, this time paying users of Yahoo Answers. Apparently users will be able to enter their YPN ID at some point (Yahoo’s equivalent of Adsense). Jen writes:

There is no word yet on how exactly this will work, other than it is tied to those who answer questions. And there are currently no ads running on Yahoo! Answers, so it is unclear if ads will be added, and clicks on ads would be shared with answer contributors. Yahoo! Answers also works on a point system, so earnings could potentially be earned in accordance to the number of points earned in the system.

This is a smart move - revenue sharing makes sense in a peer production model. You’ll remember that Yahoo was similarly forward-looking when they added revenue-sharing to Shoposphere. Nice move, Yahoo, but look out for the cheaters.

Why SpotRunner Rocks!

January 24th, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

SpotRunner is a huge, huge, HUGE idea. The service allows you to create and air a TV ad for a fraction of what it would cost to hire an advertising agency; you simply choose one of their generic ads and customize it with your company logo, a new voiceover or some different images. Suddenly, creating a TV advertisement is as easy as writing an Adwords ad - and we all know what happened there. Umair Haque explains why Spotrunner is so powerful:

On Spotrunner, you choose a generic ad, and rebundle it with minor personalized info - your company’s name, contact address, etc. The indivisibility of ads has suddenly been vaporized. It’s not just that anyone can buy them - when you buy an ad on Spotrunner, you’re really buying several rebundled, microchunked goods - so it’s that the ad itself has been redefined.

Of course, SpotRunner *doesn’t need* to create generic ads - in fact, I’d say it’s a waste of time to do so. Instead, they should enable peer producers to do the hard work for them. For instance, a guy with a videocamera in New York could create some video clips of people skateboarding. He could then upload his work to SpotRunner and tag it with “skateboarding, urban, New York”. Meanwhile, a musician in London could record some rock songs and upload them. Finally, a skateshop owner comes to Spotrunner and mashes together the rock track and the skateboarding clips to create a whole new ad. Spotrunner pays the musician and the filmmaker, then takes a cut for itself.

Now scale this up to include every genre of TV advertising - suddenly you’ve got something immensely powerful. If SpotRunner have been doing their homework on Web 2.0 and peer production, they’ll intuitively understand how to develop this into a killer product. If not, there’s always Mashable Consulting Services (I had to get that in somehow!).

The Emergence of News 2.0

January 23rd, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

Inspired partly by a post by Rich Skrenta, Paul Montgomery has drawn up a News 2.0 feature list which compares some of the more interesting players in this space. Paul has put up a nice table comparing their offerings, but I’ll just reprint the full list:

Associated Content
Backfence
Bayosphere
Digg
Findory
Gather.com
Google News
Inform.com
Memeorandum
MSN Newsbot
Newsvine
Pegasus News
Reddit
TailRank
Topix.net
Tinfinger

On the surface, News 2.0 feels a bit like a contest between an orange and a spaceship and a potted plant and a spoon - the grouping seems odd because the services feel very different to use. But when you look more closely, you realize there’s a common feature set for News 2.0. And as each service tries to tick all the boxes, we’re going to see a massive crossover between their offerings. In fact, it’s already happening - Google last week added a recommended posts feature to Google News, while Tailrank is adding practically everything on the list.

Yub - MySpace for Shopping

January 23rd, 2006 by Pete Cashmore

Yub.com (buy backwards, geddit?) is a pretty neat idea. Yes, it’s an utterly cynical attempt to sell more stuff, but it also melds shopping with social networking - as it turns out, it’s a winning combination. So what does Yub do? It’s really a blend of MySpace and Epinions - the online equivalent of locking a bunch of shopaholics in a mall during a half-price sale. The idea is that users can share information about discounts and deals, resulting in higher sales for the merchants and a nice wad of change for Yub. This is by no means an original concept and the site is not new, but I think it’s a telling example of connected consumption - allowing shoppers to share information about products to help their buying decisions. At the very least, it’s good to see a social networking site with an actual business model (beyond the obligatory “we’re going to be the next MySpace/Facebook/Tagworld“).